Where Are You At NASCAR, & Where Are You Headed Now?
Written by Allan Brewer · July 30, 2007
Thoughts from a “NASCAR-Outsider” on what he saw and heard at The Brickyard
by Allan Brewer
allan@fastmachines.com
I’m not a NASCAR fan. Let’s get that out on the table first thing.
I don’t live and breathe for the next small-track dust-up between Tony Stewart and whoever; nor do I get real excited when the tin-tops come to town (in my case, to Indianapolis Motor Speedway).
From that perspective, let me tell you what I (a wishfully non-partisan observor of the NASCAR carnival) saw and heard over the course of the last week in covering the event for this website and for Motorsport.com.
Most significant of everything that I saw was the victory Saturday night in the Busch Series race at O’Reilly Raceway Park by Jason Leffler in the Toyota-powered Camry. The little baby-step taken by the Japanese juggernaut should send shivers up and down the spines of Ford and Chevy and Dodge.
What a relief it was to see a real racer take a real racecar to Victory Lane for the Toyota team. What a relief it was to see someone other than the smarmy Michael Waltrip, again tripping over feigned lisp, as the competitive face of a sleeping giant who looks about to wake and break all the chains.
Guys, they are coming. God bless ‘em and everyone in Georgetown, KY that makes the namesake cars that the racing hardware doesn’t resemble in the least, they are coming. And they’re coming not with a carbeurator and a few sets of interchangeable shock absorbers and springs; they’re coming with a platform that screams “improve me” by crunching numbers and focusing on engineering disciplines far removed from the NASCAR ball-peen hammers of the past.
To me that’s good, because it fosters competition in a series that has (in my opinion) fallen into a technological rut that it direly needs to escape.
I saw inklings of similar thought in the merger of Robert Yates’ Racing with Newman/Haas/Lanigan as well. Here’s an established NASCAR team looking for cash, obviously, but also for technological know-how: how to operate a seven-post shaker-rig in-race to make changes on-car immediately transferable to competition, to aerodynamics, to technological innovation that will serve its championship intentions.
Here’s an example, old-school versus new-age: Robert Yates spoke at the press conference about how he would (in the past) consult the engineering side of the house for advice on how to make his car run faster, but ultimately (in his own words) “I had a stopwatch and if what we (the trackside crew) did made it go faster, that’s what we went with.”
Pause for a second and consider how General Custer must have felt when he wheeled out onto the plains of Little Big Horn that fateful day with his own “pocketwatch”. Now consider how the technicians sitting behind a bank of computers and the wizards of physics and aerodynamics that make up the engineering backbone of most modern racing teams must be chomping at the bit to slice off a chunk of that ticking, anachronistic timepiece.
The presence of four cars in the top six grid positions from IndyCar Series teams put the punctuation mark on that reflection as well: here we found Reed Sorenson (Chip Ganassi Racing), Juan Pablo Montoya (Chip Ganassi Racing), Ryan Newman (Penske Racing) and Kurt Busch (Penske Racing) all atop the field in qualifying over a course that demands attention to detail in every respect.
It wasn’t lost on me or anyone observing closely that the years of IMS experience those Ganassi and Penske Racing drivers could draw from allowed them to stand on the shoulders of their own Indy-500 winners and literally decades of high-tech data-accumulation and assimilation to push themselves to the fore.
Yes, when the race started you saw the familiars, the Stewarts, the Earnhardts, the Gordons, assert themselves. But it should come as a clarion call to the rest of the field, the non-elites, that they have seen the future and it is data- and aerodynamically-driven.
And if they don’t want to continue to circle the ovals in the exhaust of the Chip Ganassi’s and Roger Penske’s of the world they’d better open up their eyes and their pocketbooks to begin traversing the high-tech learning curve upwards immediately. The prospects look so appealing for the future that even Michael Andretti, and possibly John Barnes, must be stroking their chins, wondering if there’s a place for AGR and a Panther in this game.
Finally, and this (I know) is a crude estimation of popularity, I saw an Indianapolis Motor Speedway that was full; but not as full on July 29th as it was on Memorial Day. The far turn, the fourth turn, from my vantage was reasonably full above ten rows and up in a year when the same stands were literally packed full for the Indy 500. Same for the mounds around the track and on the golf course; a fraction fewer folks paid to see the Brickyard this year on a beautiful Indiana day than saw a rain-shortened 500 two months prior.
Perhaps the pendulum has swung full to NASCAR’s hemisphere and is headed back toward a more techology-driven future; and this crowd and the words I heard and things I saw ontrack this week are one of the first reflections of that move. But for the first time in a long time, the future for the innovative and disciplined teams that can harness huge amounts of data both during and before the racing seems brighter than the brute-force approach that NASCAR has (in my mind) represented heretofore.
Comments
6 Responses to “Where Are You At NASCAR, & Where Are You Headed Now?”
Got something to say?
You must be logged in to post a comment.
OK Brewer, Once again you have proven that it is better to remain silent and be thought an idiot, than to voice your opinion and remove all doubt. You may be correct that there was not as big a crowd at the Cup race as there is at the IRL race, but you seem to forget that Indy is one of the few tracks that the Cup cars run that doesn’t sell out. I myself am a waning Nascar fan, for reasons I won’t go into. but one has to acknowledge that Nascar has found a succesful formula. They alone are filling the stands weekly. You have also missed the boat about the Penske / Ganassi bunch. If they didn’t have JP or Newman, they wouldn’t be doing anything(which JP proves my contention that the F-1 boys are the best in the world). Niether team has won anything, except for JP’s win on the road course, quite the contrary, they have been struggling. Everyone struggles with technology. The key to successful racing is the show, which no one can argue, Nascar does better than anyone else. By the way, the every day American thinks the open wheel boys may drown in the rain.
No Joke!!
Oh, BTW, I stillthink Indy is a really bad place to watch a race, and apparently so do a lot of Nascar fans.
Ganassi and Penske NASTYCAR efforts are major failures. Why? The differences in winning in common template cars are miniscule, measured in tenths and nearly impossible to find week in week out; and with 43 car fields it’s more difficult to live in the top 10 than say the IRL or Champcars.
The only way Toyota will impact the Cup series is by racing with the bigger more experienced teams such as Gibbs. Lose Waltrip, if he’s the “new” face of NASTYCAR they deserve each other and their falling TV ratings and empty track seats.
If top-tier teams such as Roush and Yates are struggling financially, to the point that they need to take on wealthy co-owners, something’s terribly wrong…i.e., the expenses have gotten way out of hand.
Remember Team Racing Auto Circuit (TRAC), the sanctioning body that never got off the ground and ultimately folded? Some of its ideas
Checkout the sexy new Ford book - ford and The American Dream by Clifton Lambreth - see http://www.thefordbook.com